Knee-Jerk Reactions

Everyone who has sat in the doctor’s office has had the patellar reflex test (also called the knee-jerk reflex). The doctor taps just below your kneecap with a small rubber hammer called a reflex hammer, which stretches the patellar tendon. Your leg kicks. You didn’t decide to kick—your nervous system fired before your mind got involved.

That’s the whole point of the reflex test. It shows you that part of you is operating below thought.

Most of what we call having “a hot take” online now is the same kind of kick: an involuntary reaction. We’re just mislabeling it.

There’s a progression worth naming: Reaction becomes habit. Habit becomes reflex.

Reaction is the first encounter.

Something happens and you respond to it—genuine, considered, even if it’s quick. It’s not about good or bad necessarily. It’s about appropriate. Your dog meets you at the door. A call comes in that someone you love has passed. Your body and mind responding to a real thing.

Habit is what reaction becomes through repetition.

You’ve responded the same way to the same kind of thing enough times that trenches of thought patterns have formed. You’re still doing it more or less consciously—if someone pointed it out, you’d recognize it. You could decide to break it, the way people decide to stop checking their phone the second they wake up or to stop smoking. It takes work, but the steering wheel is still in your hands.

Reflex, on the other hand, is what habit becomes once you’ve outsourced the seeing itself—when something else decides what you notice in the first place.

That’s the move worth slowing down on. The algorithm decides what you encounter, in what order, with what framing. You’re not really reacting to the thing anymore. You’re reacting to a curated presentation of the thing, designed to provoke a specific response from you.

Your reaction can be as authentic as you want and still be playing out a script someone else wrote.

The handover wasn’t of our reactions. It was of our perception.

When you step away from the rat race for a while, you notice it. You’re not the first to get the news, so you watch other people kick before you do. You see the reflex from the outside. In that gap—between the hammer and the kick—actual thought becomes possible again.

Stepping away isn’t about overriding a reflex in the moment. By the time the hammer hits, it’s too late. Stepping away is about reclaiming the way we see the world as it is—the thing we lost first.

Once we can see again, we might find ourselves back to habits, which we can actually work on. The work isn't fighting the kick. It's getting back the ability to choose what gets near our knee.

In the race to be first, and viral, and to have an opinion about everything, it’s worth saying plainly: an instant reaction isn’t an opinion. It’s a reflex disguised as one.